The evaluation of a leadership development centre in a manufacturing organisation in the steel industry

Abstract

For any organisation it is necessary for their managers to be well developed and highly skilled. Managers who lack the necessary skills often have to be provided with the opportunity to develop further. The objectives of this research were to conceptualise the terms leadership development and development assessment centre; to explore the content and methodology related to a leadership development assessment centre; and to evaluate the results of a leadership development programme for employees on leadership skills/competencies. The study was implemented since little research in the South African context could be traced concerning the evaluation of DACs in a leadership context. Therefore the purpose of this study was to evaluate a developmental assessment centre. The participants were managers selected from a steel manufacturing organisation from the Gauteng plant. The entire population comprising 72 (N=72) participants, of whom 36 (N=36) were managers and 36 (N=36) subordinates, peers or management, were utilised in the study. The measuring instrument administered before and after the implementation of the development assessment centre was the Leadership behaviour inventory (LBI-2) ,pre- and post-leadership measures can be utilized to determine the effectiveness of various organisational interventions. Levene‟s test was utilised to establish whether the variance of the scores for the pre- and post-test was the same and Paired-samples t-test was used to analyse the data. The results indicate that statically significant increases were recorded across all the leadership competencies between the pre-test and the post-test measurements. The largest increase manifested between the Articulating vision competency, and the Systems competency between the pre- and post-test. The smallest increase was noticeable between the pre- and post-test rating for the Co-ordination competency. It can therefore be concluded that the DAC was successful in developing the leadership competencies of the middle-level managers.